#post ;; world building

[thehmn]

Here’s some inspiration for anyone who wants to write a green utopia or something that symbolize the rot under the surface.

I visited Stige Island today. It’s not really an island because it is connected to the mainland by a small road but the name stuck.

It is an artificially constructed island that was turned into a dump which made it grow bigger and bigger as more trash was piled on top.

Eventually the dump was closed down by covering it in a thick layer of dirt which is why the island is full of hills and bumps. A web of paths were created and the landscape was dotted with playgrounds and picnic tables and today it’s an incredibly popular place for the locals to relax.

Unfortunately most photos online show the island in its early sorta barren state because today it has become a haven for all sorts of plant and animal life skittering around in the dense bushes. It’s a wonderful place to go birdwatching, fishing or pick berries.

But the trash is still down there creating methane gas. What did the city do about that? Harvest it for energy of course! So when you walk around the island you’ll see pipes and what appears to be manholes that are part of this sophisticated system.

You can look at it in two ways. To me it’s a wonderful solution to turn this former dump into a beautiful green area for wildlife and people to use while also using it for energy, but the idea that something fire related could happen and blow the entire thing up and unearth the dirt of the past is pretty tempting.

[crobinet]

please keep thought experimenting with me!!!

[jellydragons]

i saw grian and skizz’s bdubs-gnome-thing and IMMEDIATELY started crying actual tears of laughter, these little Creatures are so important to me

[yourgothgirldowntown]

[rosypinkprincess]

[nights-at-crystarium]

do you think that the color white itself became unpopular on the First. bad luck attributed to white furred animals, white haired people. then their lord and savior Crystal Exarch begins to summon one white haired bitch after another

[littlecrittereli]

WK Elemental AU

(because I don't have enough AUs already...) Let me introduce you to something thats been rolling around in my brain for a little while now... The Elemental AU!

Heavily inspired by Avatar the Last Airbender, the elemental AU takes place in a universe where some people are born with the ability to control a specific element. The main difference is instead of the 4 western elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air- it's the 5 Chinese elements of Earth, Fire, Water, Wood, and Metal. (Just bc it fit the crew better! and gives me some more room to world-build)

The basic plot remains close to Wild Kratts canon. They travel the world, saving animals from the villains (Who are also elementals!) except instead of relying on technology, or their creature powers, they use their elemental gifts.

I am planning on writing about this soon since Decoded is coming to an end in only a few weeks. But I figured I would go ahead and introduce it now since I've finished all of their refs!

[dunmeshistash]

Dungeon Meshi World Map

REGIONS (Descriptions taken from the Adventurer's Bible)

WESTERN CONTINENT

Description: Bears the most scars from the ancient war. It has many monsters and ruined dungeons, and although it's vast, there are surprisingly few habitable areas. Most of the inhabitants are sturdy, short-lived races and demihumans. Elven culture has had a strong influence here. Characters: Kabru and Kuro Places of Note: Utaya Dungeons of Note: The Utaya Dungeon, The Dragon's Lair

NORTHERN CENTRAL CONTINENT

Description: The continent that is home to the largest nation, ruled by the queen of the elves. The term "Western Elves" mostly indicates elves from this region. It's the safest area and life is easy here, but its shrinking population has dangerously weakened it. Characters: Mithrun (and the Canaries) Places of Note: Western Elves's Royal District, Canarie's Headquarters. Dungeons of Note: Central Watchtower

SOUTHERN CENTRAL CONTINENT

Description: The area with the second-largest elf nation. It has more inbound immigration than the Northern Central Continent and a rather disorganized atmosphere. While it's in an alliance with the Northern Central Continent, they really aren't on good terms. Characters: - Places of Note: - Dungeons of Note: -

EASTERN CONTINENT

Description: Home to the largest gnome nation. Once dwarfs and gnomes made up the majority of the inhabitants, but in recent years there has been an influx of short-lived races from the Northern Continent and Eastern Archipelago, and the population is growing rapidly. It's a melting pot where various cultures are jumbled together. Characters: Chilchuck Tims (Kahka Brud), Senshi (Izganda) Places of Note: Magic School, The Island/Melini, Kahka Brud, Izganda, Dozahk, Bonnario, Sadena Dungeons of Note: Island, Brud Dungeon Cluster, Budou Pit, Tower of Night Cries

NORTHERN CONTINENT

Description: A severely cold continent where over half of the land is covered in perpetual snow. The majority of the inhabitants are short-lived races, particularly tall-men, but the population isn't large to begin with. It has been strongly influenced by dwarf culture. Characters: Laios & Falin, Marcille Places of Note: - Dungeons of Note: -

EASTERN ARCHIPELAGO

Description: An area where short-lived races live. As a result of a pact, there has been no interference by long-lived races for a very long time. The effects of the ancient war are slight, and they have almost no trouble with monsters or dungeons, but there's constant strife among humans. Characters: (all from different Islands) Izutsumi, Shuro and his Retainers, Rinsha Fana (Not shown) Places of Note: Island of Wa Dungeons of Note: -

SOUTHERN CONTINENT

Description: Home to the largest dwarf city. Gnome and dwarf nations often build down rather than out, and the innermost layers are extraordinarily deep. War still erupts frequently, and there are never-ending disputes near the borders. Characters: - Places of Note: - Dungeons of Note: -

If you're interested I've found a post on pixiv with the map outlines and some more info (in japanese) (edit: translated here)

I'll make a post about the dungeon descriptions later (here) but here they are, there's a little more info about Kahka Brud dungeons on my last map post

1 The Island, 2 Budou Pit, 3 The Brud Dungeon Cluster, 4 The tower of Night Cries 5 The Utaya Dungeon 6 The Dragon's Lair 7 The Central Watchtower

Map Outline

[starthecozy]

My steddie winter exchange gift for Rio!! (@steddieexchange) In which Steve throws caution to the wind and decides to show exactly how much his bard friend truly means to him. ♡ (inprnt)

[socialtownie]

now renting: bridgecreek apartments

📍plumbite cove, copperdale

[essektheylyss]

Okay but seriously, Erro's story is making me lose my fucking mind. The god of justice becoming mortal amidst an era of injustice, of not just twisted justice but a lack of it, where there is no rhyme or reason to who lives and dies, not only because of the war but also because there is nothing and no one left to enforce justice in the wake of war. There are no institutions (in the broad sense) to base any idea of justice upon, and when left to individuals to enforce in an era where survival alone is paramount, it of course falls to the wayside. There's a reason why the Platinum Dragon is a lawful deity, after all. Even a unit as small as the immediate family takes herculean efforts to maintain; the families we see in Divergence, both made and found, are scattered, torn apart, before and during this time frame. The series begins with a desperate attempt to save a family, with Fiedra orchestrating Crokas's rescue (and Erro's along with him), and even that effort could've failed had Crokas not made it out of the walls.

Of course Erro, raised to believe in the ideals of justice, loses faith. While the war rages on, there can be no justice. The scale of destruction barely leaves room for nature, let alone civilization.

Of course only in the war's wake, when the rebuilding begins, can justice become again a consideration, and it is is not innate. People must choose it, choose to prioritize it in the process of rebuilding, and not everyone does! But those who do choose it are those who Erro follows—and leads, as nothing more than a civilian, as he steps first into the fray to defend what small justice there is. All of Torm's Hill, who do step into battle in his wake. Nia, who holds faith even in loss by the bloody tips of her fingers. Crokas, who has believed he is only a monster even when he is little more than a scared child, using that belief as a weapon in defense of other scared children. Fiedra, whose ruthlessness is turned against the continued stirrings of injustice when her instinct would have urged her to join them. Garen, who remains until the end nothing more than a stone-carver, choosing to build even after recognizing when it is necessary to destroy.

Erro did not lose faith in the ideals of the Platinum Dragon—he lost faith that those ideals could survive the era in which he was born, an era that, in another form, he had helped shape. And in this form—a lonely wanderer, no better than any other traveler along the road—he saw those ideals rekindled, by the people who choose to pick up the torch. Only in knowing that that torch would be carried after he, Erro, was gone, was the Platinum Dragon able to keep faith that the world that he was leaving behind could become a better one in his wake.

[samuraijacksoff]

iv lately been converting minecraft screencaps into 32x32 pixels so i can cross stitch them :)

[sunderwight]

Random thought but:

Those wide-brimmed pointy hats that witches and wizards are often depicted wearing are for traveling, right? That's what the brim is for, to protect from the sun and other elements. But the pointy part is probably ceremonial -- historically speaking most conical hats are often worn by priests or nobility to signify rank or role.

But sometimes in fantasy settings, wizard hats don't have the brim. But witches almost never lose the brim.

This indicates to me a shared origin between wizards and witches as traveling practitioners of magic. Which makes sense! If you only get a few magical people in a community, either because magical talent is rare or because it takes a lot of study to pick it up or both, then most magically inclined people would probably be in high demand. Which would mean that there was a lot of call for them to travel around and provide their services to place too poor or remote or unlucky to have their own resident magical practitioner.

But gradually, a divide begins to occur. Formally educated magical users are of course most commonly found in cosmopolitan regions (big cities) and can afford to stay in one place for a lot longer. Perhaps even exclusively, if the community is large enough to support them! So as more great cities establish themselves and also establish things like larger and better-funded academic institutions, a class of non-wandering magic user begins to grow. This group, i.e. wizards, signal their greater access to formal education and to wealthy patrons by dropping the brim from their hats. They keep the conical shape and height, to denote status and rank, but they get all bougie about the brim. Other attempts to flaunt success among wizards emphasize the lack of need to travel for work, such as building magnificent magical towers, positioning themselves in the courts of nobility, or building entire academic institutions dedicated to the study of the arcane arts.

Meanwhile rural communities still require the services of magically inclined people, but can no longer afford to entice wizards away from their status-defining sedentary lifestyle. Thus another class of magic user (witches) begins to define itself by their continued existence and work outside of major population centers. Since witches still travel and live in the countryside, their hats keep the brim, because they still need it to protect them from the elements.

This also explains the gender differential. While magical talent probably doesn't operate on the basis of gender, classism sure does. Girls born into wealthier families are often slated for marriage alliances and encouraged to treat formal education as an opportunity for husband-hunting, rather than actually becoming adept in or engaging with the professional use of magic itself. Which doesn't mean that none of them do it anyway, but there's probably a more marked difference between women who become wizards and men who do. Especially as wizards become more preoccupied with social status, and thus more likely to gate off access to certain levels of education, so that only either the extremely wealthy or the extremely talented can get at them. If a girl's family doesn't want to go to all the trouble of paying for a full education or compelling a skilled teacher to take her on, her options for pursuing it on her own are probably quite limited.

Meanwhile out in the sticks, magic users are such rarities that gatekeeping on the basis of gender is frankly too impractical, especially considering the degree of utility magic has for saving lives and livelihoods. It's just not that feasible to give a shit about the gender of the spellcaster who is saving your entire sheep flock from a bad case of bluetongue, or holding up a barrier that's keeping a recent landslide from burying your house, or getting the ghosts out of a local well that you'd really love to be able to actually use.

So over time witches become associated with women, even though it's more that they've got a 50/50 split whereas wizards heavily favor men. In the way of things, this actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy over time, because men who develop magical aptitude see witchery as "women's work" and are more likely to try and save up and move to the city to learn "real" magic, or else try and differentiate themselves from female witches by creating their own distinctions between what they do and what women spellcasters do, carving out particular areas of focus to be the masculine fields of magic.

This would probably create even more distinct classes of magical users -- the male witches who still do the usual magic work in rural regions but don't like to be called witches, and so do something else to distinguish themselves in an equivalent of stamping a No Girls Allowed sign on their door (warlocks?), who probably still keep the wide brim on their hats but perhaps ditch the pointy part in a middle finger to the elitism of wizards (and also to ensure they're less likely to be mistaken for witches), and the magically talented people who make their way from the country to the nearest cities to try and join the wizard class. Though this group is more likely to struggle due to a lack of social or financial clout, and probably has to depend way more on having enough sheer natural talent to draw the eye of a benefactor (sorcerers?). Most of them would be men too, because of increasing social attitudes that men were just better at this "type" of magic would mean that women would have a harder time getting backing, but there would probably be some who were ambitious enough to nevertheless go for it and then end up in a related-but-still-gendered category of their own (sorceresses?).

Because classism, it seems likely that these underdog country-to-city spellcasters (probably also joining in with impoverished but talented locals to the metropolitan areas too) don't get the pointy hats unless they manage to actually succeed in being absorbed by wizard establishments, but also don't keep the brimmed hats because those are associated with being a bumpkin. They're hat-less, or else wear a completely different style. They probably also get a bit of a shady reputation because there are a lot of predatory institutions that scoop up magically talented individuals who don't know how to navigate the relevant social institutions, and then basically embroil them in debt or whatnot in order to exploit whatever magical talent they have for whatever profits are to be gained.

Of course you probably also have the opposite class of people, i.e. formally trained magic users who decide that trying to rub elbows with kings and rich people is stupid, and take their training to go off and save villages from mudslides and such instead. They're basically witches again but with a fancier pedigree, but of course coming from the outside of it they lack the community knowledge to navigate regions as well and also now there's this split from the Boy Witches Who Won't Be Called Witches, and probably what counts as Girl Magic gets very regional, so what jobs you do or how you go about casting spells has an irregular impact on what the locals will call you if you aren't a woman. If you're a woman you can probably take the witch label without as much issue. But since the fellas started as wizards, then, they more likely still call themselves wizards in the face of all this, but the big city wizards do NOT want to be associated with them (unless they do something really impressive that they can share credit for), so there has to be a new category for them (hedge wizards?) to differentiate from proper wizards. Anyway they wear the big brimmed hats again, because that's just practical. Whether they wear tall ones or not probably varies between individual and regional implications about it.

So. Yeah. Magic user hat politics, with bonus gender nonsense.

[yourgothgirldowntown]

[seaprincess-selkie]

Newest addition to the collection: Build-a-Bear Peter Rabbit🐰🥕